Re: 4 instances of ruby 1.8 running! WHY?

Not enough info. Are you proxying to Mongrel or running directly under Apache. If the latter, then every worker process will need its own Ruby interpreter. Heck, if you are proxying to Mongrel, each Mongrel will need its own Ruby interpreter. But at least Mongrels run only when you tell them to.

Re: 4 instances of ruby 1.8 running! WHY?

Well i'm too inexperienced to know the difference between those. I believe we're proxying to mongrel though. Turns out, it was because my partner was SSHed into the server and running tests as well as doing stuff in the console. I assume 1 instance of ruby for the site, 1 for the tests, 1 for the console?